The garden's living archive

The great classic of log cultivation: on an oak or chestnut round, in humid shade, the shiitake turns thinning wood into harvests that come back several years running.

The ideal entry mushroom: a vigorous, undemanding mycelium, it grows on logs, stumps, or straw bales.

A cousin of the oyster mushroom, recognisable by its bright yellow clusters.

A cascade of white needles with a crab-like texture, also called 'lion's mane', growing on hardwood logs.

The 'ling zhi' of the Chinese pharmacopoeia, a mahogany-coloured lacquered polypore. Tough and bitter, it's consumed as a decoction rather than on the plate, and is grown on partly buried logs.

Large feathery autumn tufts, at the foot of old oaks. A demanding mushroom, a poor competitor, but one that slowly 'digests' a stump you don't want to grub out.

Tiered brackets from bright yellow to orange, 10 to 50 cm across, on the trunks of hardwoods, oaks above all: young, they recall chicken flesh, in smell as in the mouth. A prized foraging find that we are only beginning to know how to grow.

The permaculture mushroom par excellence, nicknamed 'Garden Giant': it grows right among the vegetables and digests the mulch into humus while giving a harvest.

A small Japanese mushroom with an amber, gelatinous cap, the star of miso soup. It likes the cold and is grown on hardwood logs laid down in humid shade.

The button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus), grown for centuries on a compost of manure and straw, cellar cultivation par excellence, which takes up no space in the sun.

A late-season mushroom with violet tints and a characteristic scent, which grows on piles of dead leaves and withstands the first frosts.

An elegant white silhouette that springs from rich lawns and ends up dissolving into 'ink'.

You don't grow the truffle, you plant the tree that bears it: an oak or a hazel whose roots have been married to the fungus in the nursery. A patience of several years, on chalky soil.

The milk cap with carrot-orange milk of the pine woods, which lives in association with pine roots.

The winter mushroom, which fruits when almost nothing else grows. Its wild form (amber cap, velvety foot) is nothing like the white thread of the shops.

The Italian 'pioppino', grown on poplar stumps for a long time (tradition traces it to ancient Rome): a good firm, fragrant edible, productive and reliable in a mild climate, a good first log mushroom.

Two truffles more accommodating than the black truffle: the Burgundy truffle (autumn truffle) and the bianchetto (white spring truffle), reputed more tolerant of soil, climate, and host trees.